Old Violins by H. R. Haweis

This extraordinary man, originally an obscure Italian carpenter, at once created and answered that demand for Italian violins which followed both in England, and to a great extent in France, the rage for the German, and especially German of the Stainer and Klotz pattern.

Luigi Tarisio, like W. Forster, eked out the scanty income which he derived from making tables and benches for the peasants by playing dance music on a very poor fiddle at village routs.

He wandered from place to place, what time the vintages were being gathered in, and the simple folk, who turned out in their Sunday finery for a little relaxation and merriment, doubtless regaled the Italian carpenter with open-hearted hospitality, whilst he, in return, mended their benches and fiddled for them at the vineyard cabarets.

Our Charles Mathews has given in his delightful autobiography interesting glimpses of that free, open-air, open-hearted life; for he also, for a time, lived amongst these rustics of a favoured clime, enjoying their simple pleasures, and contributing in his own peculiar way, by his histrionic gifts and a somewhat free-handed distribution of coin, to their revels and their needs.

Luigi Tarisio soon began to be dominated by the spell of his violin; he got to notice other violins, to repair them all in the way of trade, to possess them, not always very honestly, pitting his own growing knowledge of their merits against the ignorance or necessity of their owners. Gradually Tarisio the carpenter and Tarisio the fiddler seemed to be merged in Tarisio the cunning repairer and Tarisio the still more knowing buyer.

He bought chiefly by exchange, for money he had little or none; but he began in the early years of this nineteenth century to lead that nomad life -- as it seemed to outsiders, the life of a common pedlar -- which enabled him to glide without suspicion into half the sacristies and convents in Italy.

Wherever he went, bag on shoulder, and basket of tools in hand, his cry was not "knives to grind," nor "shoes to mend," but "violins to repair."

He usually had with him a decoy violin or two, in the shape of common fiddles in good playing order; and over a glass of lemonade or a bottle of wine, in some local café or monasterial domicile of priest or cathedral musician, the cunning Tarisio would view with unaffected pity the miserable old battered Cremonas which were then lurking in a thousand ecclesiastical nooks, split as with the "wolf," ill-adjusted, ill-strung, and generally out of sorts, and whipping out his common fiddle in perfect order, would play a few notes on each, so manifestly to the disadvantage of the Cremona that an exchange was soon effected, and Tarisio would decamp with an Amati, a Strad, a Joseph or Bergonzi treasure, which, after a little clever mending, might be worth a fortune; and in this way he possessed himself, often for a few francs, of instruments which now fetch over £1000 in the open market -- if ever they get there.

Tarisio, with the infallible instinct of a born collector and connoisseur, in a few years was able to gauge accurately the merits of the different great Italian makers. He knew exactly where to rank the Amatis, and how to separate the qualities of the great Nicolo from those of Andrea; he understood the supreme excellence of Antonio and the power of Giuseppe, and all other grades of merit of which even the admirers of the Cremona school in England seemed entirely ignorant of. All Amatis at that time were lumped together, and Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri were hardly known at all.

But Tarisio knew all this, and a good deal more, before he tossed his heavy bag of old violins one day over his shoulder and set out, they say, on foot, or anyhow else he could, for Paris; for what market was there in Italy for such priceless Cremonas when their owners were prepared to give them up for fiddles worth from five to twenty shillings?

But why did Tarisio go to Paris? He probably judged wisely that the Stainer craze, and the huge crop of common violins then being made in Germany, would have killed his market nearer home. Then he must have heard when a boy how Napoleon I. had ransacked the art treasures of Italy, and how, under the advice of the cultivated Marquis d'Avèze, who had narrowly enough escaped the guillotine in 1793, the great conqueror had inaugurated a high Art Exhibition for the people.

The famous bronze-gilt horses from S. Marco, Venice, the Dying Gladiator, the Apollo Belvedere, the Cupid and Psyche from Rome, and Raffaello's Transfiguration itself, had been carried in triumphant procession through the streets of Paris, and installed in a vast hall for the benefit and instruction of the people. Of course a rage for everything Italian was the result, and the shrewd Tarisio may have thought, why not a rage for old Italian fiddles?

One day in the year 1827 there arrived at the shop of M. Aldric, at that time a famous violin dealer in Paris, a travel-worn man in ragged clothes, who had begged and fiddled his way for days and weeks across country. He carried a huge dustman's sack over his shoulder. He seemed to M. Aldric a very poor sort of pedlar, grimy and unkempt enough to claim kinship with the man who had "used somebody's soap sixteen years ago, since when he had used no other."

The fashionable violin dealer was at first inclined to show him the door, but probably something in Tarisio's independent manner betrayed that indefinable quality we call character, and, more in amusement or out of pity than with any serious intent to make a deal, M. Aldric allowed the pedlar to empty his sack of fiddles on his counter. It is easy to imagine his astonishment at what he saw; but he seems to have kept up his indifferent manner, not supposing the poor creature before him could be in the least aware of the treasures he sought to dispose of.

M. Aldric was soon undeceived.

He quickly found the tables turned upon him.